Playfish’s Quiztastic Facebook game shuts down

It looks like Playfish has permanently shut down its Facebook game Quiztastic! Players visiting the application can no longer access it; instead, Playfish has posted the following message: We’re sorry to announce that Quiztastic! will not be broadcast any longer. Thank you everyone for supporting the show with your fun quizzes!

Quiztastic! has also been removed from the Games section of Playfish’s website and from the Playfish forums.

Launched in November 2009, Quiztastic! was a trivia game modelled after TV quiz shows like Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. The game stressed user-generated content by allowing players to create their own quizzes and tests and earn quiz intelligence (QI) points based on how many other people liked them.

As SocialTimes reports, however, Quiztastic! was never able to reach 500,000 monthly active users (MAUs), which made it a severe underachiever compared to other Playfish games like Pet Society and Restaurant City.

Depressingly, SocialTimes’ Neil Vidyarthi suspects that Quiztastic! likely failed because it didn’t incorporate the usual relentless viral marketing techniques that can make Facebook games so annoying.

“In my first few sessions, I didn’t get the usually intrusive prompts to constantly ‘invite my friends’ or ‘challenge’ my friends, and I enjoyed that. However, the nice guy finishes last, especiallly on Facebook,” said Vidyarthi.”If you want to get attention, you need to be loud and get users to invite, invite, invite. Hopefully we’ll see games move past that in the future, but definitely not at this early stage.”

A Playfish spokesperson has confirmed with Gamezebo that the company has decided to shut the game down:

“Yes, unfortunately, Playfish has shut down Quiztastic! Obviously, it was a difficult decision and one that we put a good deal of thought into. “With each Playfish game release, we push the boundaries of innovation as much as possible. Quiztastic! was no different. We looked upon the game as an experiment in bringing user generated content into social gaming. As is the nature of the social gaming space, which is still relatively young and developing, some ideas resonate over time and others do not. This issue is not unique to Playfish and is a natural evolution all companies within the sector have experienced with some of their games at one time or another.”